War Winners

By Ronald Clark

War Winners is a fully illustrated description of the impact of science and technology on war from the days of the American Civil War to Vietnam. The rise of the machine-gun and the attempts to counter it with chemical warfare and the tank lead on to the birth of radar and the astonishing galaxy of scientific equipment with which both sides fought the Second World War. The devices of the Petroleum Warfare Department, the attempts to destroy Germany's crops by fire, the birth of 'Colossus', the computer which helped make possible the code-breaking triumphs of the Bletchley teams, and the plans for 'iceberg aircraft carriers' were all involved. The story is brought up to date by accounts of the nuclear armouries, a look at the weapons of the electronic age and a brief glance at the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448206209

Ronald Clark

Ronald Clark was born in London in 1916 and educated at King's College School. In 1933 he chose journalism as a career; during the Second World War, after being turned down for military duty on medical grounds, he served as a war correspondent. During this time Clark landed on Juno Beach with the Canadians on D-Day and followed the war until its end, then remained in Germany to report on the major War Crimes trials. Clark returned to Britain in 1948 and wrote extensively on subjects ranging from mountain climbing to the atomic bomb, Balmoral Castle to world explorers. He also wrote a number of biographies on a myriad of figures, such as Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, and Bertrand Russell. Clark died in 1987.

Book preview

1 When Science Goes To war

Early in 1942 the United States government was forced to make one of the most crucial decisions ever taken by a nation at war. In Europe, where Hitler’s forces then occupied most of the continent, the Germans were believed to be at work on an ultimate weapon, a nuclear bomb that would unleash the immense energy locked within the atom. If this weapon could be built, American scientists realized, it could not only make German-held Europe impregnable to attack but might even bring defeat to the United States in the war she was waging against the forces of Japan, Germany and Italy. The only answer was a nuclear weapon of her own, completed before the enemy had made one.

But despite what were then the misty uncertainties of nuclear research, one uncomfortable fact had been discovered: that the heart of any nuclear explosive would have to be formed either of plutonium or of one particular kind of uranium. As far as was known, the first of these two rare elements did not even occur in nature. Plutonium had to be made – if it could be made at all in the required amounts – within a device then called a ‘pile’ and today called a nuclear reactor. Although there appeared to be two practical ways of building one, no reactor had yet been constructed anywhere in the world. There was still doubt about whether one could ever be built and a large quiver of questionmarks hung over the prospect of producing a vital nuclear explosive in such a way.

Yet to the Americans, the second alternative, that of making a nuclear explosive from uranium, seemed even less likely to succeed. The problems with uranium were more complex than separating it from the ore in which it was found. Uranium, it was known, occurred as five chemically identical kinds or isotopes; only one of these, uranium-235, could be used to start a nuclear explosion and in uranium as refined from the ore only 0.7 per cent was this vitally important isotope. What is more, any method of separating the 0.7 per cent of uranium-235 from the other chemically identical 99.3 per cent involved unresolved difficulties. Minute quantities of uranium-235 had indeed been produced in the laboratory, but amounts several million times as large would be needed even for a single war-winning bomb.

The Americans knew that there were three possible ways of separating the different uranium isotopes. The gaseous diffusion method, which had already been investigated in Britain, was based on the fact that if a gas containing various uranium isotopes is diffused through the right kind of barrier, the lighter (uranium-235) will get through more quickly. A gas passing through a large number of such barriers would thus contain progressively more and more of the needed material. But the only gas which could be used was uranium hexafluoride, among the most intractable of all gases to handle, while the number of barriers necessary, the scientists warned, would not be dozens, not hundreds, not thousands even, but tens of thousands.

Another potential road to success was to subject uranium to electric and magnetic fields, since each isotope would be deflected differently, a useful fact of nature which appeared to make their separation possible. But the magnets would have to be 100 feet long; enormous supplies of electricity would be needed as well as the most expensive and complicated kind of high-vacuum equipment. Finally there was a process in which the gas was circulated between two concentric pipes, one being steam-heated and one water-cooled, so that the lighter isotope would become concentrated near the inner pipe. Here it was not electricity but steam – in other words coal – which was needed in immense quantities. Each of these ways of making a nuclear explosive looked outlandishly expensive; each, moreover, was still a dream in the scientist’s mind, and each might be a complete failure.

The Americans, faced with the challenge, met it head-on. They decided to investigate not only the three methods of separating uranium-235 but also the two possible methods of making plutonium. After a meeting on 23 May 1942, the scientific leaders recommended a programme, later approved, to spend a total of 85,000,000 dollars on a centrifuge plant, a diffusion plant, and an electromagnetic separation plant – all three to produce the fissile uranium-235; on a uranium-graphite pile to produce plutonium; and on a plant which would produce the half ton a month of heavy water needed for the second kind of pile. Action followed quickly.

In Chicago a team under Enrico Fermi showed that a nuclear pile would work, a success which led to the building of the 1000 square mile Hanford Engineering Works on the Columbia River north of Pasco. At Columbia University, Harold Urey, the discoverer of heavy water, helped industrial engineers to develop the gas-diffusion process. Despite enormous difficulties the engineers succeeded in creating the huge Clinton plant in Tennessee (now called Oak Ridge) where the nuclear explosive was produced by diffusion of the gas through hundreds of acres of diffusion barriers, spread across more than 50 acres of factory floor and connected by hundreds of miles of piping. At Berkeley, Ernest Lawrence carried out experimental work on the electromagnetic process; and work on the thermal-diffusion process went ahead under P. H. Abelson.

Meanwhile, at Los Alamos, in the deserts of New Mexico, a vast research organization was set up under Robert Oppenheimer. Within it, America’s leading physicists investigated how the nuclear explosive – if and when it was ready – could be fashioned into the most efficient weapon. In all, more than 2,000,000,000 dollars were to be spent before a plutonium bomb was tested in the Nevada desert in 1945, a uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima and a plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. America’s decision in 1942 did in fact show that by the mid twentieth century she had acknowledged the overwhelming need to back a potential warwinner with all the resources of men, money and materials that the nation could command.

For the purpose of this book, a scientific war-winner is a science-based weapon which, for a period and in certain circumstances, occasionally in isolation but more usually in combination with other weapons, can turn the tide of a battle, a campaign, or possibly even of a war.

Only rarely, does a single war-winner achieve its aim in isolation, and only rarely does its decisive role remain uneroded for long. Gunpowder, with its ability to reduce city walls, ended siege warfare; the longbow, whose arrows could pierce heavy armour, gave the yeoman the power to topple a social system. But on the battlefield these war-winners lost their effectiveness as siege warfare was abandoned for the war of movement and countermovement, and as the longbow appeared on both sides in any important battle.

If three weapons can be cited as typical war-winners they are the machine-gun, developed mainly by four Americans, which won for the British the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century; the proximity fuse which helped to destroy the Japanese air force above the Pacific; and the atomic bombs which ended the war with Japan. In the last case the enemy, it is true, was on the point of surrender; but even had this not been so it is beyond dispute that ‘the bomb’ would have ended hostilities. Yet the decisive importance of the machine-gun had disappeared by the time of the First World War when its deployment by both sides led to the stalemate of the Western Front. In much the same way ‘the bomb’ began to lose its decisive role as nuclear powers realized that their own use of it would be merely a prelude to their own destruction. Only the proximity fuse has retained its earlier potential; but even here it must be asked if the circumstances of the Second World War are ever likely to be repeated.

The tank, decisive when used with air supremacy against the Germans in 1918 and by them in 1940, retains its supremacy today only when supported by a galaxy of technological and electronic equipment. Radar, a decisive if not the decisive factor in the Battle of Britain, became less effective as German counter-measures were used against the huge Anglo-American air offensives of 1943 and 1944. And the German rocket, a potential warwinner against which there was no defence, failed by being brought into operation ‘too little and too late’.

If war-winners have any features in common they are their ability to satisfy the operational need of their time and circumstance, and their translation from scientist’s idea into weapon of war as soon as technological advances allow. The tank and the aeroplane, both thought of by Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century, awaited the petrol engine; airborne radar was made possible only by development of the cavity magnetron, the jet engine only by the development of metals able to withstand the immense heat of the gases passing over the turbine vanes. And nuclear weapons only became possible when uranium isotopes could be separated on an industrial scale.

More than one potential war-winner has been turned down for ethical reasons. Thus the British government decided in 1855 that no honourable combatant could take up Admiral Lord Dundonald’s idea of using chemical warfare against the Russians in the Crimea. A few years later the proposal of the New Yorker, John W. Doughty, to use liquid chlorine gas shells, was rejected by the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, presumably for the same reason. Evolution of some devices to the status of potential war-winners took more than a century. It was in 1776 that the world’s first submarine attack was made by the American Turtle on a British warship off Staten Island, but only in 1917 that German U-boats brought Britain to the verge of defeat. By contrast, radar, one of the keys to victory in the Second World War, was in operation four years after it had been decided to transform a scientist’s idea into an early-warning system.

One handicap to the development of war-winners has been that the attitude of servicemen to additions to their armoury was for long basically different from that of the scientists. This was natural enough. The basic service tradition is obedience; that of science is the questioning of beliefs as they are, and it is not surprising that the weapons that changed the world have in some cases remained suspect long after their value was beyond rational dispute. The Lords of the Admiralty ‘felt it their bounden duty’ early in the nineteenth century, ‘to discourage to the utmost of their ability the use of steam vessels’.¹ More than a century later Admiral Leahy, the explosives expert who was President Roosevelt’s Chief of Staff, stated after the test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo: ‘I do not think it will be as effective as is expected. It sounds like a professor’s dream to me.’²

Nevertheless, the United States has usually been quick in appreciating the advantages of scientific advice. In the Civil War the Federal government’s Navy Department appointed a permanent commission of scientists, including Joseph Henry, Charles Henry Davis and Alexander Dallas Bache, to sift through and assess the hundreds of inventions and technological suggestions put forward by civilians. The US service mentality – exemplified by the Navy’s reluctance to admit that ‘Billy’ Mitchell’s bombers of the early 1920s marked the beginning of the end for the battleship – has